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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The Maryland study is just the latest piece of evidence that police are routinely restraining people in ways that are causing premature, unnecessary death — and that by refusing to shield themselves from bias, medical examiners are ensuring that those deaths continue."
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POST: "New study: State medical examiners wrongly excused homicides committed by Maryland police officers," by Radley Balko, published on 'The Watch' on July 21, 2025. (Investigative journalist. Proprietor of The Watch newsletter. Ex-Washington Post. Author of Rise of the Warrior Cop, co-author of The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist.)
SUB-HEADING: "After the Derek Chauvin trial, the state ordered an audit of autopsies done on people who had died in police custody. The results are disturbing."
GIST: When former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was tried for the murder of George Floyd, former Maryland Chief Medical Examiner David Fowler testified for the defense.
Fowler told the jury that Chauvin’s actions did not cause Floyd’s death.
He disagreed with Minnesota medical examiner Andrew Baker’s classification of Floyd’s death as a homicide.
That alarmed a lot of medical professionals, activists, and state officials. Fowler’s office had been involved in a number of controversial in-custody deaths in Maryland.
Other medical professionals had questioned his office’s classification of those deaths as natural, accidental, or undetermined.
Such classifications typically close off any further investigation into police culpability.
They also tend to shut down discussion about whether such deaths could have been prevented with different policies or better training.
After the Chauvin trial, Maryland officials ordered an audit of how Fowler’s office classified in-custody deaths. The results of that audit were published in May. They were alarming.
The audit designers first found 87 deaths in police custody in which police had used restraint.
Then assembled a team of medical examiners to review the autopsy reports in those cases and come up with a manner of death determination — whether the death was a homicide, accident, natural death, or undetermined, meaning there was insufficient evidence to make a determination.
The audit used a process called sequential unmasking to expose the reviewers to only the evidence they needed to draw their conclusions, while shielding them from irrelevant but potentially biasing information, such as the race of the deceased, or whether the deceased had a criminal record.
Of the 87 deaths the auditors examined, they found 36 in which the Maryland Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) should have classified the manner of death as a homicide, but instead classified it as something else.
The audit also found that OCME pathologists were less likely to classify deaths in police custody as a homicide when the decedent was black.
The auditors, who again were initially blinded to the race of the decedent, had no statistically significant racial disparity in their manner of death determinations.
As I’ve reported here previously, law enforcement interests and police-adjacent companies like Axon have expended a wealth of resources trying to dispel the idea of positional asphyxiation — that police are killing people by tasing, beating, or putting their weight on suspects while they’re restrained, particularly in the prone position.
They’ve pushed dubious concepts like “excited delirium” or “sickle-cell trait” to explain away why otherwise healthy people die at the hands of law enforcement.
Some factions of the medical examiner community have been complicit in pushing these ideas.
During a contentious listserv discussion after Floyd’s death, for example, a former state medical examiner in Milwaukee — who also consulted for Chauvin’s defense — wrote, “Is there anyone in our profession that has not, at one point or another, quipped about ‘spinning the wheel of death’ and picking one?”
Yet when studies have demonstrated cognitive bias in how autopsies are conducted, many in the medical examiner community have lashed out with anger and defensiveness, and refused to implement procedures that could help filter out some of that bias.
The Maryland study is just the latest piece of evidence that police are routinely restraining people in ways that are causing premature, unnecessary death — and that by refusing to shield themselves from bias, medical examiners are ensuring that those deaths continue.
I spoke with William Thompson, professor emeritus of law, criminology, and psychological science at the University of California-Irvine, and one of the co-authors of the Maryland study:
https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/new-study-state-medical-examiners
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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